Michael Johnson. UMF image

FARMINGTON — Michael Johnson, professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington, has recently received the Western Literature Association’s 2024 Thomas J. Lyon Award for best book in American western literary and cultural studies. Johnson’s book, “Speculative Wests,” is a study of the “Weird Westerns” genre that merges western settings with science fiction, fantasy, horror or alternate history.

The WLA promotes the study of the diverse literature and cultures of the North American West. The organization brings together scholars, artists, environmentalists and community leaders who value the West’s literary and cultural contributions to American and world cultures.

“I’ve worked as a scholar in the field of the study of the American West for over twenty years, and I’ve seen the excellent work that has received this award in the past, so I’m very honored to receive the 2024 Western Literature Association’s Lyon Award,” said Johnson.

“Critics have been declaring the death of the western for over a hundred years. That it has most recently come back to life in the [sometimes undead] form of weird westerns and speculative westerns seems appropriate. My book pays detailed attention to the wide range of twenty-first century speculative westerns, indicative of the way the genre of the western has continued to grow and change in surprising ways,” said Johnson.

UMF will be offering a Weird Westerns course [ENG 377] taught by Johnson this spring. The course is a hybrid of online and in-person sessions. It will zoom weekly with students at Texas Tech University in a similar course taught by Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University professor of American literature, literature, social justice and environment.

For more information, visit: https://www.umf.maine.edu/continuing-ed/take-classes/

“Johnson’s book is eye-opening and could be useful for writers or readers who want to be challenged by perspectives on Western fiction that they might not have previously considered,” said Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Roundup Magazine.

According to the University of Nebraska Press, “Johnson’s narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the “Speculative Wests” that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland’s ‘Deathless Divide’ [2020] … Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.”

Michael K. Johnson is professor of American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. His primary research areas are African American Literature and the literature and culture of the American West. He is the author of the recently published “Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and a Genre.” He has also written two biographies, “Can’t  Stand Still: Taylor Gordon and the Harlem Renaissance” and “A Black Woman’s West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon.” He is also co-editor [with Kerry Fine, Rebecca Lush, and Sara Spurgeon] of “Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre” and the forthcoming “Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western.”

Johnson received his master’s and PhD from the University of Kansas.